Autonomous eMotorsports racing games: Emerging practices as speculative fictions

Abstract

Motorsports games and simulated automobile racing occupy a dynamic genre of computer games for entertaining play, critical game studies and ‘auto-play’. This article utilizes the lens of speculative design to present six scenarios that seek to motivate the design of autonomous eMotorsports games and play experiences through alternative design fictions. These fictions serve to help identify and tease out how different socio-technical configurations emerging around autonomous vehicles, motorsports games, sim racing user interfaces and user experiences, embrace or exclude different stakeholders. These stakeholders can shape how autonomous eMotorsports games, game play and game viewing will emerge and prosper. These fictions also serve as a narrative web of possible socio-technical configurations open to critical review through: (1) transhumanist spectacle and spectating; (2) technofeminist and gendered framings of these configurations; and (3) whether digital artefacts configured to realize autonomous eMotorsports games have politics.